Ryan Turnipseed does not exist and he must be punished for existing.

OGC’s Ryan Turnipseed recently put the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS) into a state of confusion and delay. Mr. Turnipseed very successfully criticized the LCMS’s new Catechism, which is a book used to teach people how to be a Christian.

Ryan Turnipseed 🦬 @TurnipMerchant

The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod just put out a new edition of Luther’s Large Catechism, one of the main books used to teach people about Christianity and what it means to be a Christian. So, what got added?

The view count is not shown in the above embed, but the count is currently 259,700, and his Twitter thread below that post had an extraordinary reach and effect on Lutheranism. Indeed, Mr. Turnipseed led the charge against the new Catechism.

In response, the LCMS has demonstrated zero curiosity toward Mr. Turnipseed’s criticisms of their new Catechism, or “Cataclysm,” as one might humorously refer to it. One can easily type his alleged pseudonym into Google and see overwhelming evidence that he is, in fact, a real person. https://www.google.com/search?q=ryan+turnipseed. But the higher ups in the LCMS deny the existence of Turnipseed, while some others float about the idea of his excommunication. Here are some screenshots of significant figures within the Lutheran Church pretending that Mr. Turnipseed is “anonymous.”

Todd Wilken, host of Issues Etc. (the largest “conservative” Lutheran radio show), denies Mr. Turnipseed his name.

Bethany Kilcrease, wife of one of the members of the Synod’s CTCR (The board responsible for the catechism), denies Mr. Turnipseed’s name, blaming the backlash on a “mob of anonymous twitter trolls”.

David Benke (Wikipedia entry here), denies Mr. Turnipseed his name and diminishes him as “Someone with a lot to get off his chest”.

Disbelieving the entire event, Peter Speckhard asks for quotes from the actual book to illustrate the issues. The quotes from the book that started this whole issue can be found here.

Reverend Edward Engelbrecht entirely denies the existence of a Ryan Turnipseed, saying, “We had a new user post here that Mr. Turnipseed is a real person… WHAT EVIDENCE IS THERE?” (emphasis added).

What’s up with this pretense that he is an “anon?” Even the slightest sincere engagement with Ryan Turnipseed would reveal that he is not anonymous. On Benjamin Boyce’s podcast, I recently described the political orientation of the regime Americans live under as “Antifascism”—specifying that Antifascism is not “anti-Fascism,” but it’s own, independent ideology, and not even particularly related to Fascism at that (it has a more direct lineage to Bolshevism). Antifascism is characterized by the violent suppression of anything that acts in opposition to managerial oligarchy (usually incorrectly referred to as “democracy”), which is the type of government currently operated by Antifascists.

Opposition to Antifascism has virtually nothing to do with Fascism, or being a Fascist; although, this is how Antifascists characterize their opposition. That said, the “Fascist” is a sort of Ur-character whom Antifascists cannot admit actually exists. This is why the Antifascist media and Antifascist individuals such as Jordan Peterson are obsessed with the slurs of “trolls” and “anons” (anonymous people). These epithets have a dual purpose: One, they allow the Antifascist to dehumanize their opposition, depriving them of “human rights,” because in their calculus, individual human rights can be sacrificed in the name of the generalized, impersonal individual, which is something akin to the idea of a “General Will” from Rousseau—ironically, because this impersonal individual is not an actual person (ironic since this is their main false attack on Turnipseed). Second, the more important role of these epithets is that they allow the Antifascist the psychological comfort of pretending that their opposition does not actually exist. They aren’t “real” people with real, sincere beliefs—they are just jokers of some sort, trying to provoke a reaction. Facilitating this is an essential role for the the therapeutic state, which is the type of state that the managerial oligarchy runs. In summary, Antifascism is the ideology that justifies the governance of a managerial oligarchy, and what these manager-oligarchs manage is a therapeutic state. The Antifascist, for their own mental health, must believe that Fascism is to some extent not real. If it was real, it would mean their “reconstruction” of the human being was fundamentally flawed, which would punch a hole straight through their world view, into the vacuum of illiberal space.

Unfortunately, this illiberalism, which again, is not “fascist,” (although that is their word for it) is real. A secondary way that Antifascists will cope with this is to simply write off social media as irrelevant with a sort of “head in the sand” mentality. The idea that social media is “not the real world” and is not a major driver of significant world events is so obviously false that it is not worth a tangent here.

We can see, at least, that some of the Redditors, to the detriment of their karma score, acknowledged Mr. Turnipseed’s existence, and that fact that he went through the effort of “long form” explanation; although, I am aware of certain friendlies who went into these threads as well, so these could be “our guys.” Either way, Ryan Turnipseed has achieved algorithmic breakthrough, and the LCMS is going to have to deal with the fact that Mr. Turnipseed is human after all.